Matthew Desmond Quotes
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When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
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I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.
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Eviction causes loss. You lose not only your home but also your possessions, which are thrown onto the curb or taken by movers, and often you can't keep up payments.
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Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.
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Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.
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I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.
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In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.
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'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
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African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.
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I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
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When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.
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A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
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If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.
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There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
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I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
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I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.
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When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
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Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential.
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Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
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I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
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Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street.
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If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.
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Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
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When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.